Solicitation Process for Bulk Management of Annual Fund/Membership Donations

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People were asking about this at the conference, and I got distracted by something shiny and regretfully didn’t get to this until now. Sorry if I left you waiting.

We have a process to use the Solicitation Module to handle Solicitations on our smaller annual fund donors. While others in our organization use solicitations on larger donors, corporations, foundations, major gifts, capital, endowment, etc., we’ve managed to streamline bulk entry and processing of small annual fund donors of any size, so we can keep on top of them using the processes to get higher completion on this process. We use this to manage membership donations given via Telefund (those who say they intend to give, but want to do it via the mail or give online), mostly, but also for some Patron ($2500 and up) donations and to handle Matchign Gifts

This is handled via a number of steps—it looks like a lot, but each one is easily handled.

I’ll break down them in more detail in later detail, but this is a short description of the process used for Annual Fund/Membership gifts:

1. Get IDs and commitments from our Telefundraisers, breaking it down into Firm Dollar Amount Commitments and Wishy-Washy "I'll give something" type commitments, and also separately into New/Renewals and Additional/Upgrade commtiments.
2. Enter that into Lists (by copying the IDs into a text file and importing that text file into Lists)
3. Use the Solicitation Module in Campaigns to Add Solicitations to those donor’s accounts, setting a Complete By Date based on the date they were contacted
4. Add the fact that there’s a Solicitation to the Header so that people can use the individual Designation when the gift comes in.
5. Use the Update function in Solicitation Module to periodically close the Solicitations for people who have given gifts
6. Run a special list to identify donations that may be in response to the Solicitation that might not have been coded properly when they were entered
7. Periodically follow up via mail reminders to people with open Solicitations
8. Cackle maniacally as the money rolls in, and more and more people enjoy their membership benefits.
9. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I'll go into further detail on any of those processes and how we get that sorted out if people are interested, but that's the general break-down. The key hurdles are getting the ID numbers to put in the commitments, and then following up and making sure that gifts given go to fulfill that commitment, and then following up with those who have pledged (a soft pledge, not an actual Pledge pledge) to make sure they fulfill their pledge.

-Chris